Chandra Bozelko: Cancel not, lest ye be canceled

Chandra Bozelko More Content Now

Friday

Oct 4, 2019 at 9:29 AMOct 9, 2019 at 11:25 AM

Cancel culture - the practice of refusing to acknowledge people whose behavior has been labeled unacceptable or problematic - and collateral consequences of a felony conviction - being denied jobs, housing, education, licensing or affiliation because of a criminal record - are essentially the same thing. In addition to society’s denouncing what it thinks you’ve done before, it wants to derail your future, too.

What everyone else is seeing as a new, dangerous encroachment on personal freedoms has been happening for years to people like me. I’m pleased people are finally pushing back and trying to cancel cancel culture.

Refusing to erase a person from public acceptance for bad behavior is recent. Until last week, there was very little room on the bandwagon when someone’s name was associated with “racist tweet.”

Casino security guard Carson King tripped into fame when he appeared in the background of an ESPN broadcast with a sign that read “Busch Light supply needs replenished” with his Venmo handle. When his beer mug runneth over with donations, King diverted them to a children’s hospital and became a hero.

Not wanting to be left out of the viral story, the paper of record in King’s home state, Iowa, published a feature on him. Des Moines Register reporter Aaron Calvin did a deep dive into King’s Twitter feed and found shameful tweets from years ago, when King was 16. If King’s tweets had been a crime, his record would have been sealed, removed from open records and no one would have known.

As a result, Anheuser-Busch, which continues to match donations, wanted “no further association” with King when they heard the news. The fact that Anheuser-Busch is keeping its donation promise but refuses to associate with King makes the cancellation all the more pronounced - and unwarranted.

One would have expected King’s online persona to disintegrate, but the opposite happened. He apologized. The governor of Iowa still proclaimed Sept. 28 as Carson King Day. As of Oct. 3, he had raised $3 million in total for University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

King’s supporters should have just taken the win, but they scrolled through Calvin’s Twitter feed and found a few wonky ones in his background. Now Calvin’s canceled, too. He lost his job at the Des Moines Register because of offensive messages he posted years ago.

Calvin apologized as well, but later told BuzzFeed News he did that in an unsuccessful attempt to keep his job.

Racist and sexist tweets are always a party foul, but I think the Des Moines Register should have retained Calvin, if for no other reason than to cut the cancel culture chain.

Only this phenomenon’s label is new. We’ve been doing this for years, allowing retribution to ricochet repeatedly and take out everyone. It’s why we have 70 million people in the United States with some form of criminal record. That’s 29.4% of the country’s population. It’s not “judge not, lest ye be judged” anymore. It’s, “You’re judging me? Hold my beer.”

Our antipathy towards wrongdoers, even redeemed ones, birthed cancel culture. It would have no power without the newsworthiness of checkered past. It’s not just criminal records; mistakes of any kind have become vital statistics. You can’t even get killed without a public dredging of your transgressions, as a 2017 L.A. Times opinion piece noted:

“In the case of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old shot to death in 2012 by a neighborhood watch volunteer, Fox News criticized the victim’s clothing choices, while the Miami Herald felt the need to dredge through his school suspension records.

“A now-infamous New York Times profile of Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, insisted the victim ‘was no angel,’ despite no one ever having suggested he was.

“The day after Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder for the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald, CNN said on Twitter that the victim had led a ‘turbulent life’ and noted that the teen had been ‘abused.’”

Hopefully the nascent resistance to cancel culture will extend to collateral consequences eventually and we won’t hold people’s failings against them once they’ve held themselves accountable.Chandra Bozelko writes the award-winning blog Prison Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and email her at outlawcolumn@gmail.com.

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